How Kathleen Collins's Daughter Kept Her Late Mother's Career Alive

A struggling filmmaker whose life was cut short by illness, Kathleen Collins has a soaring career since her daughter reopened her archive.

Ten years ago, in the middle of an ugly divorce, the most banal of realizations came upon me: In order to find a path out of the mess I’d made, I needed to wrestle with the history that had shaped me. My mother, the late African-American writer, filmmaker, and activist Kathleen Collins, died of breast cancer in 1988 at age 46, when I was still a teenager, leaving me to care for my younger brother. Our parents had split when we were toddlers, and we had been raised by a single, black artist mother, vibrant yet frequently depressed, and unwavering in her commitment to her work. She had kept her illness a secret until two weeks before she died.

In those first few weeks after we buried her, I filled an old steamer trunk with every scrap of paper I could find among my mother’s things: copies of her many plays, short stories, screenplays, journals, letters; and VHS tapes of her two films, The Cruz Brothers and Miss Malloy and Losing Ground, neither of which had been released theatrically. Along with her work and personal correspondence, there were photographs of her ancestors dating back to 1700s New Jersey farmland, snapshots of her singing with Freedom Riders in Albany, Georgia, in 1962, and a handful of high-quality artistic images of her taken by my father when they were still in love. Over the next two decades, that heavy trunk moved with me everywhere I lived. It was a coffee table in my first studio, spent some time at the foot of my bed in my 20s, and eventually, when I had a house, was relegated to my basement. I often wanted to look inside, and a few times I made tentative forays, but the sight of my mother’s familiar scrawl on the pages made me feel shaky. It was simply, for a very long time, too sad for me to hear her voice again.

But it had become harder to ignore the likelihood that the depression and anger that were overtaking my life probably had roots in my erratic childhood. Like many women, I felt to some extent as if I was my mother, as if I couldn’t avoid being her. I held on to the conviction that I would die the same way she did; that I would become a single mother; that my unhappiness was the same as hers. The question was whether I could look at our story in a new way.

As I had told more than one therapist, my earliest memory was one of abandonment. I was two and woke up in the middle of the night calling out for my mother, but to no avail. I started to cry and made my way to the front door of our apartment in the West Village, where I discovered that I was too small to reach the locks. My memory of screaming and crying in the dark and trying to open that locked door remains vivid. Our neighbor heard me and tried to soothe me through the door. Eventually someone found my mother, who had been upstairs in the apartment of a friend. She rushed down, and I imagine must have felt awful. She surely comforted me and put me back to bed, but that part of the experience is gone.

When I think of her in those early years—tall boots; short skirts; Afro; flashing, heavily made-up eyes—my image is of a sad glamour. I remember her rushing by me a lot, always preoccupied. She and my father were cheating on each other, and both trying to make art, and my guess is I was a bit of an afterthought. There’s a photograph of me in her arms from that period, in which she looks elegant but slightly beleaguered, and I’m peering at her with deep suspicion.

After my brother, Emilio, was born, she got a job teaching film at City College and moved us to a house along the Hudson River in Piermont, New York, my father being mostly out of the picture. When I think back, the dominant sounds of my childhood are of my mother’s IBM Selectric II clattering away behind her bedroom door; film swishing through the Steenbeck editing machine that sat in our dining room; and, occasionally, Tina Turner blaring from the stereo while she danced like a madwoman in the living room.

My mother wrote incessantly; multiple creative ventures were always under way, as well as grant applications, project proposals, and constant jottings in her journal. She alternated between being distracted and enraged, often over something my father had done. I was the practical one. From me she would get complaints that we never had Band-Aids, that we didn’t have a fire-escape plan, that I was better at packing our lunches than she was. Of course, what I really wanted was her focus, but that was usually elsewhere. She didn’t know when I was having trouble in school, or later when I was smoking weed or having sex. She was always in her own head.

For the most part she kept her own love life out of our sight, but as her daughter I was paying close attention, and thus observed her affairs with married men, and young men she worked with on sets. Caught up in the seventies spirit, she went on meditation retreats, did yoga on the second-floor landing, and, during my middle-school years, got interested in New Age phenomena, from biofeedback to macrobiotics. Incense was forever burning.

I later put together the fact that the New Age trappings coincided with her first diagnosis of cancer, when she was 37, and that she attempted to treat the illness homeopathically. She had two lumpectomies over the next few years (telling us she was at film festivals when she was actually hospitalized), the scars from which she brushed off as “something minor.” She didn’t have radiation or chemotherapy until the last months of her life—after her third recurrence—by which time her body was riddled with disease. She started those treatments soon after I left for Vienna on a study-abroad program, so I never knew. Why she didn’t embrace Western medicine from the start is a mystery, and yes, thinking about it makes me angry.

One of the last times we spent alone together was a blustery October day in 1987, less than a year before she died. I was a sophomore at Barnard. My mother had fallen in love two years earlier with an academic named Alfred Prettyman, and they had just announced plans to marry. We set out to find her a wedding dress, something suitably bohemian. I hadn’t seen her in a few weeks and noticed she was thinner than usual, and walking funny. She claimed she’d pulled a muscle in her back. That afternoon, we wandered in and out of stores on Columbus Avenue until we found what we both decided was the perfect dress: rose-colored silk with a flared skirt.

Mom seemed sad that day; we’d been fighting. I was in a feminist snit, with all the righteousness that an eighteen-year-old can bring to it, over the fact that she was planning on taking Alfred’s last name. It felt like an unimaginable betrayal. We argued long and hard about this, and as I look back, I feel terrible that I gave her so much grief. Only in retrospect is it obvious that she knew her cancer had returned, that she was trying to hold together so much.

A few days after the simple wedding—just family and a justice of the peace in our living room, me sulking, my mother in her pink dress—I flew to Austria. We embarked on eight months of letters in which she filled me in on local gossip, life with Alfred, reflections on her love for us and where she thought she may have failed us—in short, everything under the sun except for the fact that in January, just weeks after she put me on a plane, she began chemotherapy.

Eighteen years later, on a still midsummer day, I turned to the trunk in earnest. I was upstate, in the home I’d made for myself and my four children in the wake of my divorce. Surrounded by optimistic colors, I lifted the handle in hope of understanding so many things. Reaching inside, I pulled out yellowed reams of paper, some handwritten, others typed. There were short stories I never knew existed, about growing up black bourgeoise in Jersey City; others that fictionalized the intense civil rights work she did with SNCC in her 20s (she worked on voter registration and speechwriting). I found accounts of her difficult relationships with men, from my white father to the playwrights, actors, and writers who followed. I discovered plays and screenplays about the loss of her own mother—my grandmother died when my mother was five months old—and her stern father. After years of being afraid to delve in, I now couldn’t stop reading. The stories were like a portal to her inner life, the themes and characters both strange and familiar, in that way that everything about our parents somehow already exists within us.

The trunk also held in rubber-banded packets all of her correspondence to me at camp, in Europe, or after we’d argued. I could practically trace the arc of her development as a woman, as an artist, as a mother. In some, she affectionately makes reference to “my Nina’s” personality or accomplishments, and those are passages I read over and over again, never tiring of seeing the proof of her love.

Most shattering of all was the diary she kept the last year of her life, when she knew she was dying, and I was oblivious. I can line up, side by side, letters she wrote to me bubbling with love and funny anecdotes (one on the back of an envelope while a state trooper was writing her up for speeding), and journal entries from the same days, visualizing her illness as a vile fluid coursing through her bones.

A side from a single story in a now-defunct literary journal and a play in an eighties anthology, my mother’s writing was never published in her lifetime. She was known as a playwright, and as one of the first black women to make a feature film, but only within the small world of black artists and academics. The films were produced out of our Rockland County house, so I knew them well. When I rewatched them as an adult, it was evident to me that the second one, Losing Ground, a dramatic comedy about a black female philosophy professor and her painter husband, was particularly accomplished, visually striking, and intellectually fresh. I felt a new admiration for her and wondered idly if it would ever see the light of day.

A couple of years later, the film lab that had been storing my mother’s original 16mm reels contacted me, asking me to pay back storage fees, and it occurred to me that maybe it was time to try and preserve her legacy. These were talky, artsy films, featuring all-black casts in the days well before The Cosby Show and President Obama. No one in the early eighties had wanted to hear these stories, much less distribute them. I didn’t have any illusions that anyone would necessarily want to now, but I felt it was important to save her work. Soon I had had both films restored and found a distributor, Milestone Films. Then, in 2014, Milestone called me to say that Lincoln Center was putting on a film festival about black independent movies in New York, and that Losing Ground had been selected to open it. I was thrilled for my mother, and at the same time grieved anew for her—she would never see her work get shown.

As the festival date approached, one glowing review after another started to roll in. A color still from the film splashed across the top fold of the New York Times Arts section, under which the critic wrote, “highly cerebral, thick with abstract and erudite dialogue and also full of charm and sensuality. . . . ”

That fall I received a phone call from the editorial director of the literary journal A Public Space. She was working on an issue about forgotten female artists and wondered if my mother had left any unpublished work. I sent her some early stories. A few months later she published “Interiors,” a barely fictionalized tale of my parents’ unhappy break-up. This December, a full collection, Whatever Happened to Interracial Love?, will be released by Ecco Press.

In the foreword to the book, poet Elizabeth Alexander writes of my mother, “She flinches from nothing.” I love the line because its fierceness reminds me of her, and of me, the way we tackle life head-on. And yet I know my mother did flinch from some things. I think often of a passage from one of the letters she wrote me in Vienna, a few months before she died: “I couldn’t possibly allow myself to love you children except by being a good caretaker and a good provider. I, literally, put my love into that and kept my heart closed. It was all the love I could handle, all I could provide. I was going through my own life keeping up, coping, holding on, trying not to fall apart.” Even as I appreciate the reasons, I can’t help wishing she had been as risk-taking in her maternal love as she was in her work.

And yet her spirit carries through. I see my mother in each of my children, but perhaps most in my daughter Ruby, who, especially in these times of continuing racial turmoil, has the same interest in activism through the dramatic arts, and thinks she may want to be a film director herself one day. Ruby wrote about Losing Ground’s revival for her college application. Last summer, helping her revise the essay, I was reminded of a day 30 years earlier, lying on my mom’s queen-size bed in Piermont, atop a mauve comforter dotted with white birds, when she helped me craft my own essay about being biracial in an artistic household. Having reached the age my mother was when she died, I have a gentler understanding of all she was trying to do, and forgiveness is within reach.